***
The skywalking Nita had in mind didn’t involve actual walking, as in the various exploits using hardened air. From the manual Nita had pulled a spell that persuaded local gravity to ignore her for a while, wrapping it around her like a blanket so that it dissolved into her body. Another price to be paid later— and not too much later.
I’ll worry about that in half an hour, Nita thought as she more completely undid gravity’s effects on her mass and drifted ever more quickly upward. Normally this kind of spell was a fair amount of work, which was why wizards didn’t overdo it. But she was in a hurry, and the effort would have a specific use in what she was doing; so Nita soared, and enjoyed it. Since who knows how much time I’m going to have to enjoy afterwards?
She reached an altitude of about thirty thousand feet above Argyre Planitia and just hung there, savoring the view. High above her, Mamvish’s cloaking spell was holding: it was too far above the planetary kernel’s range for Aurilelde to interfere with it, and too powerful for Khretef or Iskard to alter, even if they wanted to. Down below, though… water was everywhere. It was stunning. Nita thought of how it would be someday when people from Earth or wherever started terraforming this terrain slowly and responsibly. When there was an atmosphere again, when there was enough heat held in to keep water liquid, enough to grow plants ...she could imagine what it would look like. But even now the huge flow and rush of water across the landscape was beautiful. Chains of crater lakes flashed in the sunlight: water was rushing down the sides of Valles Marineris in waterfalls six miles high. The southern polar basins were flooding, flashing the Sun back in a bloom of light—
—and a small, dark shape was suddenly there between Nita and the water, drifting closer, her veils of smoke and her smoky hair wreathing weightless around her up here in the almost-nonexistent air: Aurilelde. Nita let herself drift closer to Aurilelde, holding out her hands, ready. Normally she didn’t believe in grandstanding during her spells, and dramatic gestures weren’t for her. But perception could count for a great deal in a wizards’ duel.
Nita gulped hard at the thought that that was exactly what she was now embarked upon. It was not a situation you normally invited. Wizardry itself could become cranky at the concept of being used against itself without good reason. And she wasn’t sure that even having Bobo on her side would necessarily mean she was going to prevail in this contest. The phrase “grudge match” kept rising in her mind, and Nita had to keep pushing it away.
Aurilelde was drifting closer to Nita now. Nita assumed an amused smile while stretching out her senses to learn the one thing that she most desperately needed to know: that the kernel was still indeed here, and complete. It’s all here, and it’s still inside of her.
“So you can feel it,” said Aurilelde. “You’re more talented than I thought.”
“Any wizard can feel it,” Nita said. “And are you insane to actually allow someone to talk you into putting a planet’s kernel inside your body? Do you have any idea what that’ll do to you?”
“Rorsik has told me what it will do to you,” Aurilelde said. “That’s sufficient.”
Nita shook her head. “Bad advice,” she said. “The kind of management you get from internalization is short-lived. And management isn’t anywhere near mastery. Down on the ground, it might have been enough. Up here?” She laughed softly. “Let’s see what you’ve got, because the about-to-be-ex-Khretef can’t help you anymore.”
“On the contrary,” Aurilelde said in her mind, cold and furious. “He’s helped me all he needs to. And he’s taken your little ghost-Kit’s power and shown me how to use it to manage the planet’s non-gravitic forces: the magnetic fields, the upper winds. So now the problems are all yours. Does the ground suit?”
Nita frowned. In a wizard’s duel, the phrase acquired a meaning past the usual one; it was tantamount to offering the other wizard a choice of weapons. “Aurilelde, that is not a question you have any right to ask me! You’re just piggybacking on a wizard’s talents. If you were one of us, you’d be concerned about the responsibility that goes with the power. But you just want your own way. You don’t care what happens to anyone else.”
Aurilelde gave her a furious look. “I care! I care about Khretef! More than anything—”
“No, you don’t,” Nita said. “And if you did, that would be another problem.” She clenched her fists. “I really don’t want to do this…”
“That’s apparent,” Aurilelde said, laughing. “You hate the thought of fighting to keep what you think is yours! You want me to just give him up and walk away.”
Nita shook her head. “One of us has to be grown up about this, and I guess it gets to be me. Despite the fact that you’re about five billion years old—”
Aurilelde glared at her, furious. “I am not!”
Nita had to grin. And name-calling is so unproductive usually. “Okay. Four point five billion, give or take an eon.”
“And you just want back what you think belongs to you!” Aurilelde said. “Khretef told me what he could hear in Kit’s mind. You never let him be what he wanted to be! It was always about what you wanted, what you feared. But when he started to find a new life, a different world, you wanted no part of it: it bored you! Only when you thought it might take him from you did you start to become interested, and then you pushed yourself in—”
Nita was about to start arguing hotly about how this wasn’t true. But she stopped herself. “This is about what you’re about to do to my home planet. It isn’t about him—”
“It’s all about him!” Aurilelde cried. “It’s only about him! To try to pretend otherwise is a lie. And wizards don’t lie. Do you?”
Nita let herself drift more closely to Aurilelde, trying not to make it look like she was doing it on purpose. But as she did, through her tenuous connection to Mars’s kernel, she could feel the planet under her shiver uneasily, as if about to turn in its sleep. It wasn’t a feeling she liked.
“You’re trying to tell me,” Nita said, “that I’m just jealous of you. There’s an easy lie. Even easier for somebody who’s not a wizard. But even if you and Khretef are so much older than us, that doesn’t give you the right to do whatever you like with Kit’s soul! And if you or Khretef have actually done what you say you have”— she found suddenly that she was shaking— “then it’s better we should all die, right here and now. The One will sort us out, reincarnation or no reincarnation. I know what Timeheart is, if you don’t!”
Aurilelde’s expression was going back and forth between stricken and furious— and then the horror shifted permanently to rage. Nita, drifting just a little closer, thought again of the good old cartoon idiom about getting an opponent angry so they’d make a mistake. Aurilelde was making it already. Just let me close enough to you to get a good grip and pull that kernel out of you—
But Aurilelde wasn’t angry enough. One last thing was needed. “I wonder, though,” Nita said, “whether someone who died for you once might just see how you’re behaving now and say, ‘Did I die for her, or did she just let me go out and be killed so she could have this? The power to rule the planet?’” For she could feel the tremor down below them starting to grow. “‘And when this poor Kit came along, she used him the same way, and let his soul be lost so she could keep this power for herself—’”
“No!”
“And then he’ll say, ‘How long do I have? When she realizes the truth, she’ll find another way to get rid of me!’” Nita was now staring into Aurilelde’s eyes from only a few feet away—
“No, no, no!” Screaming, Aurilelde lunged at Nita. Nita grabbed for her, but Aurilelde hurled herself backward and away in reaction, raising her arms.
Underneath the two of them, the surface of the planet started going hazy. Dust storm? Nita thought, and then realized the truth. No! Marsquake!
The planet’s crust was beginning to convulse, great ripples starting to spread away from the spot beneath them. Craters were cracking across, water floodin
g down into the crevasses; elsewhere vast blocks and slabs of stone were jolting upward out of the crust—
Olympus Mons wasn’t affected yet, but Nita had no idea how long that would last. She doesn’t realize what she’s capable of with that thing inside her, Nita thought, horrified. She doesn’t realize that the kernel’s more than just a planet’s physical rules, but its spiritual affiliations too, the myths and stories others wind into it, all tangled up together. Aurilelde didn’t realize what was happening to her. She was becoming Mars itself, a mad Mars: not a god of war, but a goddess, and a goddess scorned—
And in her craziness she’ll pull the whole planet apart, Nita thought, horrified. She could feel the tremors propagating farther down into the crust, the strains in the planet’s mantle increasing. It’ll just shatter! At first the pieces wouldn’t go far: they’d settle into another great asteroid belt. But orbits elsewhere in the system will be destabilized! And Earth’s closest—
Twenty-four minutes, Bobo said.
Nita swallowed and headed directly for Aurilelde. “If you’re trying to get at me that way,” Nita said to her, “you’re going to have to get a lot more personal.”
That was when the blow hit Nita and slammed her tumbling up toward space. “Think so?” Aurilelde said. “Then we’ll just give you your wish.”
Around Nita, now choking in the vacuum, suddenly freezing, the pitiless darkness closed in...
***
In the darkness Khretef’s voice was saying, “It doesn’t matter, anyway. When they’re done, when Aurilelde’s won, we’ll be one forever. Why should this be so bad?” Khretef was almost pleading. “We were so alike, anyway, almost the same...”
Standing there by himself in the dark, holding off its ever-increasing pressure, Kit shook his head. “We have things in common, sure!” he said. “We’re alive! And you and me, we’re in the service of Life: you took the Oath! We’re on the same side! So why are you trying to rub me out? Wizards don’t destroy things without good reason! Wizards keep things going, they fix what’s broken, they don’t throw other living beings out just because they’re in the way!”
“But Aurilelde says—”
“Aurilelde’s not a wizard, Khretef! She’s a seer, yeah, but even seers don’t always see straight. Especially if they’re scared! She’s scared for you, and she’s letting that warp the way she sees what has to happen. You can’t just let her pictures of how the world ought to be erase yours. It’s as bad as what she’s told you that you’ve got to do to me!”
“That’s wrong,” Khretef said. “That has to be wrong. You don’t understand—”
Once again that uncertainty made Kit sure he was right. “She got it backwards, buddy!” Kit said. “She foresaw us, me and Nita, and she saw that we were somehow the answer to Mars’s problem. No news there: every wizard’s the answer to some problem of the universe’s! But she also saw that everything was going to have to change for you guys in some big weird way, and that scared her. She started concentrating on the parts of the vision she could bear to look at, and screened out the rest. She saw she needed a wizard’s power to bring Earth’s wizards into the picture. She saw herself at the center of it, protecting her dad and her people, even protecting you. So you gave her access to your power. And now you just feel like an idiot because you can’t take it back without a fight, and fighting her’s the last thing you want to do!”
The silence in the darkness was anguished.
Finally the voice spoke again, and this time it was far less Kit’s, far more Khretef’s. “She was so sure,” he said. “Even when I started becoming uncomfortable about letting her share my own power...” Kit could feel Khretef’s shame at that remembered discomfort: how could he deny any part of himself to the love of his life? “And then she said, ‘The other’s coming: give me his power if you can’t give me yours! It won’t matter; he’s just another you. And think what it will mean. No more fighting. The end of the other side’s threats, at last and forever—’”
“The old story,” Kit said. “And not Aurilelde’s voice, either. You know who wrote that dialogue! You didn’t invent war: the Lone Power did! One of its favorite tools—because war’s the easy way out of conflict. And not having wars, having enough compassion and smarts to stay out of them, is real hard work! Getting into the other guy’s mindset is real tough to do in the first place, and it’s hard to stay there. Lots easier to decide that the other guy’s so different from you that there’s no hope for him. That he’s going to hate you forever, and for the sake of your peace of mind he’s better off dead.”
The image of that dark splotch on the Korean peninsula, where the light suddenly stopped, was flaring at the back of Kit’s mind: and Khretef saw it, too, laid out before them in the darkness as Kit had seen it while sitting on his Earthwatching rock on the Moon. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, Khretef! Break the pattern and poke the Lone One in the eye!”
There was a long silence. “They’ll say I’m a traitor to both sides,” Khretef whispered. “Again! And I’ll be betraying Aurilelde, too—”
“Brother, you’ve got to do something!” Kit said. “You can’t just sit here and let this go on! It’s not just your world, and your people—all of them, the Eilitt and the Shamaska. It’s Earth, too, billions of people whose lives are going to get completely screwed up because of what’s happening here if it’s not stopped! You’re a wizard. You know how it has to go! You can love Aurilelde all you like, but if you don’t act now, the Lone Power’s just going to sit there laughing at how you gave It just what It wanted while you were sure you were doing the only thing you could.”
Another long and desperate silence. “What do I do?” Khretef said finally.
“Let me go!” Kit said. “I’ll do what I can for you and Aurilelde, I promise, but right now we’ve got two whole worlds to worry about. Let me out of here!”
The silence continued. Then the pressure against which Kit had been straining started to let up. From deep inside the darkness, Kit felt a shift in the power underlying the place. The feeling started slowly transmuting into a weird stretching, as if something was fastened to Kit’s skin and his bones, pulling him painfully out of shape. Kit set his teeth, tried to deal with the pain as it worsened, became intolerable—
It stopped.
It’s not working, Khretef said silently, as if inside Kit’s head again. It’s too late. For both of us...
***
Nita tried to blink, couldn’t. She gasped for air, shivering with the frost that had formed on her skin in just a few seconds of airless darkness. Bobo?
She hit you with a chunk of hardened atmosphere, the peridexis said. I was just able to keep your shields in force at minimum, because you weren’t entirely unconscious. You got lucky. Stay conscious, or I can’t be of any use to you!
Nita brushed away ice, blinked until her eyes worked again, and turned to face Aurilelde, who was hanging there in the darkness and laughing. “You see?” she said. “You have no idea what I can do. With the kernel, and the power of a wizard whose will is in abeyance, I can do things you can’t imagine!”
Nita was starting to get really steamed now. “What, hitting somebody with a brick? That’s unimaginable? Heaven forbid I should get really creative with you, then. Let’s keep it simple.” Because all that bluffing down there aside, I really don’t want to run the risk of killing you and maybe screwing up the kernel forever!
She reached her hands out into the space around her. Dust, she thought. The space around the planet was full of it. Nita called it to her, whispering in the Speech. Dust, come help your mother-world, because if this space case has her way, there won’t be a solid place for you to fall back on: you’ll be left floating out around here by yourself forever in the dark till Jupiter eats you or you fall into the Sun! Come lend me a hand here, get solid, get real—
Seconds later Nita was almost obscured by a cloud of it. Aurilelde laughed at her. “You think you can hide that way?” she cried, and c
ame at Nita. “Watch this—”
“By all means,” Nita said, turning the spell loose, and swept one hand down at Aurilelde. The dust followed, clumping together, solidifying, and striking Aurilelde hard in the chest. The impact of the blow sent her plummeting toward the planet as if a giant hand had swatted her there.
Nita dived after her, intent on the kernel. Have to work out how to do this. Don’t want to hurt her, just have to get that kernel out of her! Got them out of walls and floors and planetary cores before: but those weren’t alive. How do I do this without—
Something struck Nita hard in the head. She jerked sideways, dazed for a moment, and just got a glimpse of the thing as it floated away on the rebound. It was a nickel-iron meteorite about the size of a walnut. Aurilelde, recovering too quickly from Nita’s blow, had snagged it in passing and slung it at her.
Nita put her hand up to her head, pulled it back and saw the blood, and went queasy. Better quit being so nice and put a stop to this real quick before she hits you with something bigger. Like Deimos!
Fortunately Mars’s lesser satellite wasn’t in the neighborhood, but there were other asteroid fragments nearby, and Aurilelde threw a number of those at Nita, missing as Nita dodged. Then she started using the weak Martian magnetic field itself on Nita. Strange lights started sparking at the back of Nita’s eyes, and her ears started ringing as her nervous system complained about the abuse by the locally accelerated fields—
Would you please cut that out?! Nita said to the magnetic field: and as usual, preferring courteous wizardly persuasion to the crass ordering-around that Aurilelde was inflicting on it, the knots of magnetic flux assailing her dissolved.
But by the time Nita’s vision and sense of balance were back to normal, Aurilelde was trying the hardened-air exploit on her again, this time simply sliding a block of it up under Nita and accelerating it. Whoa! Nita thought as the acceleration sharply increased. Not good, we’re heading for escape velocity here— !
Nita angrily pushed sideways off the block to drift free again in the microgravity: then spoke the phrase that would undo several vital strands of the antigrav spell she was wearing. I’m trying to help you out here! she said in the Speech to Mars’s gravity well. A little pull here, please? You’ve got some gravitational anomalies to spare—